And so, today, RIM announced its Hail Mary - a brand new mobile operating system (well, sort-of new), as well as two new devices. In addition, the Canadian company also officially changed its name from Research In Motion to Blackberry. The firstfewreviews of Blackberry 10 are already out, and it's not bad. The problem, however, is that in the case of Blackberry, 'not bad' could easily mean 'not good enough'.

BlackBerry did something interesting today, they showed a great deal of finesse in their execution with BB10. Let's remember, this is a product which is late to market, in a crowded environment, from a vendor which has had a pretty dramatic fall from grace and suffered from chronic mismanagement for quite some time.

The fact that BlackBerry is seemingly firing on all pistons is encouraging from a management point of view, and speaks volumes to their ability as a company to deliver in the future.

Is BB10 perfect? Will it achieve a meaningful uptake the first time around? No and probably not. But it doesn't have to be.

It has to be good enough to buy BlackBerry time to iterate on their product. I think they have a few unique selling points and I'm more optimistic after today than I was before.

The app number count is impressive, at the least. The real question is how they can over time turn these "port-a-thons" into organic interest in the platform. Is BlackBerry in the conversation when it comes to developers writing new apps? Do they differentiate on BlackBerry by integrating with the platform?

Microsoft has found that its very easy to strong arm yourself 100,000 apps, but its not so easy to change minds and hearts of developers when it comes to considering Windows Phone along with iOS and Android during initial product planning.

I'm bullish because BlackBerry has strong loyalty and strong carrier relations so they can get a decent retail push.

Areas where I'm negative are the actual devices themselves, they don't really have a unique selling point. That, and the Android app compatibility is (as I predicted it would be) a fucking mess. Reviews say that its slow, foreign, and undesirable. Sure it help inflate app numbers and it brings apps to the platform much quicker, but the cost is user experience.

I'm not sure that users will penalize BlackBerry less because they have a slow, glitchy, unusable port of Instagram vs how much they penalize Microsoft for not having Instagram on WP. We'll see though.

Overall I'm extremely impressed and when stepping back to see the larger picture, pretty excited for BB10s prospects. I'm usually bullish on emerging OSes though.